At RSA Conference 2023, a number of Netskopers from across the organization who attended the event in San Francisco shared commentary on the trends, topics, and takeaways from this year’s conference.

Be the first to receive the Cloud Threats Memo directly in your inbox by subscribing here. While the most common cloud apps are also the most exploited for delivering malicious content, opportunistic and state-sponsored threat actors are constantly looking for additional cloud services to leverage throughout multiple stages of the attack chain.

As we witness a growing number of cyber-attacks and data breaches, the demand for advanced cybersecurity solutions is becoming critical. Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a powerful contender to help solve pressing cybersecurity problems. Let’s explore the benefits, challenges, and potential risks of AI in cybersecurity using a Q&A composed of questions I hear often.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications have become an integral part of modern enterprise operations. According to a recent report by Gartner, the worldwide public cloud services market is projected to grow to $591.8 billion in 2023, up 20.7% from $490.3 billion in 2022, with SaaS being the largest market segment representing about 33% of the market.

CrossLock is a ransomware group that emerged in April 2023, targeting a large digital certifier company in Brazil. This ransomware was written in Go, which has also been adopted by other ransomware groups, including Hive, due to the cross-platform capabilities offered by the language. CrossLock operates in the double-extortion scheme, by threatening to leak stolen data on a website hosted on the deep web if the ransom isn’t paid by the victim.

Quality of Service (QoS) is a standard metric for any infrastructure, networking, or operations team contracting with a tech vendor The average network SLA, for example, is crawling with QoS metrics covering a range of things, including packet loss, jitter, latency, bandwidth allocation, response time, and uptime.

I think we can all agree that the Australian government has demonstrated its will to empower our country, its organisations and citizens to be more secure online. Australia has become a prime target for bad actors, and like my counterparts, I appreciate a government with a hands-on approach—one that recognises the criticality of cybersecurity.

Netskope Threat Labs is tracking a phishing campaign that mimics a FedEx package delivery as bait to steal credit card data. This type of social engineering attack is commonly found in phishing pages, emails, and other scams, where a false sense of urgency is created to urge the victim into doing an action that eventually leads to personal data theft.

Netskope Threat Labs publishes a monthly summary blog post of the top threats we are tracking on the Netskope platform. The purpose of this post is to provide strategic, actionable intelligence on active threats against enterprise users worldwide.

Google Drive continues to be one of the most abused cloud services by threat actors, and the latest edition (April 2023) of the Threat Horizons Report, released by security researchers in Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG), shows more interesting examples of how opportunistic and state-sponsored threat actors are exploiting its flagship cloud storage service, to conduct malicious campaigns (and by the way, Netskope Cloud and Threat Report is quoted in the report).